Associative conditioning in "Drosophila melanogaster" has been well documented for several decades. However, most studies report only simple associations of conditioned stimuli (CS, e.g., odor) with unconditioned stimuli (US, e.g., electric shock) to measure learning or establish memory. Here we describe a straightforward second-order conditioning…

The NMDA receptor partial agonist d-cycloserine (DCS) enhances the extinction of learned fear in rats and exposure therapy in humans with anxiety disorders. Despite these benefits, little is known about the mechanisms by which DCS promotes the loss of fear. The present study examined whether DCS augments extinction retention (1) through reductions…

Using a combination of eye tracking and fMRI in a contextual cueing task, we explored the mechanisms underlying the facilitation of visual search for repeated spatial configurations. When configurations of distractors were repeated, greater activation in the right hippocampus corresponded to greater reductions in the number of saccades to locate…

Although there is good evidence for implicit learning of associations between forms, little work has investigated implicit learning of form-meaning connections, and the findings are somewhat contradictory. Two experiments were carried out using a novel reaction time methodology to investigate implicit learning of grammatical form-meaning…

Classic approaches to word learning emphasize referential ambiguity: In naming situations, a novel word could refer to many possible objects, properties, actions, and so forth. To solve this, researchers have posited constraints, and inference strategies, but assume that determining the referent of a novel word is isomorphic to learning. We…

This mixed methods counterbalanced study compared the gain score means of two different approaches to vocabulary acquisition--Vocabulary Theater (VT) and Teacher Directed Instruction (TDI) for 8th grade students from three schools in New York. The purpose of the study was to explore the effects of a peer teaching approach on students' vocabulary…

Purpose: To examine the degree of convergence in word association responses produced by bilingual children with primary language impairment (PLI) in relation to bilingual age peers. Method: Thirty-seven Spanish-English bilingual children with PLI, 37 typically developing (TD) controls, and a normative sample of 112 children produced associations…

The purpose of this study is to determine biology student teachers' cognitive structure with regard to "Blood". Qualitative research method has been used. The free word association test and the draw-write technique have been used in collection of data. The data obtained have been evaluated and divided into categories based on content…

In two experiments, it was investigated how preverbal infants perceive the relationship between a person and an object she is looking at. More specifically, it was examined whether infants interpret an adult's object-directed gaze as a marker of an intention to act or whether they relate the person and the object via a mechanism of associative…

Often when failing to solve problems, individuals report some idea of the solution, but cannot explicitly access the idea. We investigated whether such intuition would relate to improvements in solving and to the manner in which a problem was solved after a 24- hour delay. On Day 1, participants attempted to solve Compound Remote Associate…

In two experiments, participants studied two types of word lists. Direct lists were taken from the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (e.g., "water", "bridge", "run") and contained words directly related to a nonpresented critical item (CI; e.g., "river", Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Mediated lists (e.g., "faucet", "London", "jog") contained…

According to the cognitive cascade hypothesis, age-related slowing results in decreased working memory, which in turn affects higher-order cognition. Because recent studies show complex associative learning correlates highly with fluid intelligence, the present study examined the role of complex associative learning in cognitive cascade models of…

The social-pragmatic theory of language acquisition proposes that children only become efficient at learning the meanings of words once they acquire the ability to understand the intentions of other agents, in particular the intention to communicate (Akhtar & Tomasello, 2000). In this paper we present a neural network model of word learning which…

Both adults and young children possess powerful statistical computation capabilities--they can infer the referent of a word from highly ambiguous contexts involving many words and many referents by aggregating cross-situational statistical information across contexts. This ability has been explained by models of hypothesis testing and by models of…

The study set out to examine the partial word knowledge of native speakers, L2 advanced, and intermediate learners of English with regard to four word features from Richards' (1976) taxonomy of aspects describing what knowing a word entails. To capture partial familiarity, the participants completed in writing a test containing low and mid…